Complimenting a Colleague's Personal Growth

It takes more than opening the dev tools fast enough to run a JavaScript snippet to stop a feature flag check that prevents you from using an enterprise feature when you're just on the pro plan to be a great engineer. This is SoftSkills Engineering episode 459. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jamison Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who pride themselves on command shift i and then pasting JavaScript really fast. I feel like you could have a computer do that for you. Yeah, but then you'd have to take the time to write a Chrome extension and figure out all that, package it up, make your bundle, or or learn Tamper Monkey. Yeah. All of which I've done. And sometimes I just go, I'm gonna be fast. I think you really are putting the professional in the pro plan though. When did when did Pro become worse than Enterprise? I know, right? You have you have earned the Pro title. Enterprise is equivalent to contact us. Yeah. 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If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a soft skills engineering listener. And ouch, my four one K. Yes. Thank you, thank you. These are the uh the hall of champions, the heroic people that clicked the right buttons and and hooked up the right bank account information to contribute at the level where you shout them out every single week. And you can join them if you go to soft skills.audio and click support us on Patreon, where any amount will get you an invite to our Slack team and enough of an amount will get you shout-outs of various words that you type. Yes. Which make us happy also. So thank you. Ah, thank you, thank you. Do you want to read our first question, Dave? Yes, this comes from an anonymous listener who says I work for a B2C fintech startup as a senior engineer. Our onboarding funnel has a lot of moving parts due to regulatory compliance and a litany of requirements from various parts of the business. As a startup, we also live and die by optimizing for and demonstrating growth, so we need to gather data from our product and pipe it to various analytics platforms. Finally, we need to offer customer support for high touch edge cases. All of this is connected together in a very patchwork way between our own code and various secondary and tertiary systems of CRMs, CDPs, data warehouses, etcetera. I am torn between two ideas. I gotta say, Jameson, just inserting here, this feels like it's gonna be a technical question. But I'll keep reading. You gotta trust me. Okay. So I am torn between two ideas. One is that we may very well be doing something state-of-the- gut says that this is something dozens, if not hundreds, of companies have had to build at some point, but I don't know where to find people talking about it. How do I find documented real-world case studies for how to build a complete package like this? Every resource I can find online is a myopic narrow slice of the entire pie focused on only one aspect of the problem. No one is talking about how you integrate for example a sane and scalable analytics stack with a fast evolving product. All they want to talk about is how to make a quote web scale back end or quote do growth hacking while assuming someone else is going to draw the rest of the owl. I know that reference. How to draw an owl, isn't that the one? Yep Okay, last last paragraph I promise. Where do I go to find these people or these resources? Maybe these constitute some form of trade secrets. Does anybody even want to give this information up freely? If my hire ups saw me go outside the company for resources Sorry that got so long. I love the show. Keep being awesome. We don't know how to stop. Yeah . We will. That's a promise we can keep. So I picked this question because although it is pretty technical, I think it hits that this this vibe of there's this duality, I don't know that's the right term, but it sounds smart. Oh yeah. It feels like two things are often true. That one, we have this unique secret sauce here, and two, like, holy crap, someone has had to have figured out a better way to do this. Yes. I have a suggestion , which is the the best way to summon a horde of people telling you how dumb and wrong you are, and how you're doing nothing novel and how this has all been done before better by other people is to go on like a conference speaking circuit or write a blog post that gets posted to hacker news about how novel and awesome your thing is. And then the commenters will come out and say, well actually you will harness the collective energy of the internet 's well actually, which can probably like send humans to space and bunch of other stuff. I'm only slightly joking though. I think if you write down and say, hey, here's what we're doing. We think it's really awesome. It is likely to draw attention that will point you to things that that are prior art or something like that. Yeah. Oh, speaking of prior art, you could patent it. And then people try and invalidate your patent and then boom. Which you'll find out about through lawyers approaches. I guess. Yeah, that's pretty slow feedback cycle. Unless they're practicing agile law. Two and a half years after your patent com uh gets uh accepted then. Yeah. The lawyers show up. Yeah. As you were saying, you could write a blog post and then just kind of like attract the attention of all the internet naysayers. You suggested so in the blog post, describe it and then say it's good. I think you you really to get people's attention you might have to say this is the absolute best way yeah to wire up all your analytics and CRM data into one place. Yeah. Or in not even into just say this is the best way. And then people will have something to disagree with. Yeah. Don't you think in reality people are going to read it and go, yeah, oh that sounds like the same garbage sausage making that my company does. I I don't know. I mean then that that'll tell you something, right? If you say this is the best way. Or if you say we have invented a novel way. Ah yes. That can also trigger people to say, Nuh uh look at all these other things. No one else is doing this. Yeah, but if you get people to tell you you're wrong, yeah. It'll teach you some stuff. I think the most likely outcome though is you do that and no one reads the post. So Yeah. You have to get lucky. You have to win the the lottery on getting attention. I mean for the specific problem domain of like analytics and data, it feels like data engineering, growth hacking, data warehouse. There's there's like a cluster of disciplines that all seem like they would touch parts of this, but maybe that would get you into the same problem of myopic slices of the pie. I assume that there are lots of vendor blog posts where they say the answer to this problem is pay us a bunch of money for our tool. Yeah. I feel like every vendor has one company that goes all in on them and then there's this symbiotic relationship where the vendor talks about that company a lot because they're the kind of the exemplar customer. They do everything in the service, even stuff that's maybe not good at or useful for. They or they pay the most money to that company. Yeah, and they pay a ton of money and and then so they get talked up a bunch as like this awesome use case and so everybody's looking for one of those. But it sounds like you don't have that situation. You have the expected setup of a bunch of different stuff piping things all over the place to a bunch of different systems. Yeah. I think what's happening here in this organization, so I know that the the question is how do I go find out information about my what's the right way to say this? To get other people to share how they do things internally. But I guess I wanted to respond to just the the likelihood that I think you're going to find anything interesting. And I think that likelihood is very low because I think what's what's going on here. You mentioned CRMs, that's going to be your marketing team. You mentioned CDPs, that's going to be your sales team. Sorry, opposite. CRM sales team. CDP is going to be your marketing team. Data warehouse is probably your engineering team or like a data eng ineering team. And so like a product team or product, yeah. Someone who cares about that. I think what's happening here is you are watching Conway's Law unfold before your eyes, where the organiz ational structure tends to impose itself on your software systems. And they will not integrate cleanly unless your org chart has also integrated. And I'm guessing it hasn't, and this is actually very, very common. I see this all the time. Like we have full-time people at my company whose like 95% of their day job is getting data cleanly from the CRM to the CDP to the data warehouse so that it can be visualized on our BI systems for our executive dashboards and for the dashboards we put in front of our teams for their performances and performance and stuff. And it's just like, yeah, it's a mess. It's just kind of how it is. So in this very narrow situation, I don't think you're going to find anything interesting out there. But maybe they have found a novel, elegant solution. Maybe they have built the interesting thing. I I think it is you could put it out there. If my higher-up saw me go outside the company for resources, would they think I'm leaking important secret sauce? Right. I hope not. I mean the fact that it's FinTech is maybe a little wrinkle on here because it could be some more sensitive information. But just talking about like analytics and data and how you pipe stuff around, that feels pretty generic. It's also, I mean, if you are doing something cool, it's good marketing material, uh, engineering hiring, right? You attract people by by talking about the cool stuff you're doing, kind of build your your engineering team's brand. So that's useful. Diving into that question of will this be considered trade secrets or will I be revealing something I shouldn't? Typically, in my experience at least, the company's intellectual property has very little to do with how you track like customer data internally, like things that would go into a CRM or CDP or or in this data warehouse listed here. That's usually just like hey, we bolted this together out of necessity. It's the best we could do. It's not like this novel thing that we feel like is a competitive advantage typically. So I I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah. It's usually I mean and maybe that's the unique thing you have here. Maybe it's not for you. But it is usually the real engineering effort goes into the product. Right. And then up until a certain scale it's it's like the little scraps that fall off the table go into data until it becomes important enough that you put a team on it. Yeah. It's possible that you are doing something horribly wrong. Like your blog post contains a line that says, and then we copy all the credit card numbers onto the Google Sheet that we share with our our customer service team in case they need to figure out what transaction belongs to what credit card number or whatever. Then that's bad. But assuming you're not doing anything horribly horribly wrong with personal PII or or yeah, sensitive data, then Yeah. I I really would write it up and put it out there. I I think it's also a good time to throw an LLM at this and say like here's some architecture diagrams, here's kind of my description of the code flow, help me write post that describes how this works. And then find me other blog posts that have done the same thing. You can also do that. That's true. I mean, yeah, if it's digested the contents of the internet, then it could have some combination of weights in there that'll that'll spit out some evaluation of your data architecture. And then please check my blog post for violation of PCI compliance. Yeah. Somewhere some auditor just had a brain aneurysm when you mentioned replacing them with an LLM. Yeah. You know, we said when we started this podcast we'd be willing to to accept the casualties it would cause I'm I'm willing to make that trade off for the Patreon names. I honestly don't have a better answer than write about it and talk about the thing that you wrote and share it around to people. Yeah, and if your company's big enough, they might even have a policy in place that says anytime you write about the company it's gotta be reviewed before it goes live. And that'll be like your safety net to say like, hey I published this but someone reviewed it and they signed off. Yeah. Well have we answered the question? I think so. All right. Best of luck. Shall I read our next question? Yes, please. This is from a listener named Lightly Salted Meowmyx. Which is a delightful name. Wait, okay. Is this a cat commenting on how the meows tastes good or is this a human who's Either way, I'm very interested. Yeah, yeah. Lightly salted my x says I've been at my company for about four years and I'm currently a senior engineer. When I first joined as a mid-level engineer, there was a certain tech lead who wasn't ex kactnownly for his warm personality. On my very first day, I joined a zoom call and witnessed him verbally berating someone. This type of behavior was fairly common at the time and earned him quite the reputation as a jerk, though thankfully it became less frequent over the years. Fast forward today to today, and he's genuinely transformed. The intensity has dialed way down, he's now approachable, and even recently earned a promotion to engineering manager. It has honestly been impressive to watch . We have a friendly relationship and I'd like to acknowledge his growth because I genuinely genuinely admire it. Here is the catch. How do I, as someone junior to him, respectfully bring this up without accidentally implying, hey con,grats on no longer scaling everyone at work. Huh. What an interesting question. On the one hand, I feel like it would be unlikely that someone who was this intense and this much of a jerk at work would have changed without being aware of how much of a jerk they are. So hopefully if you say something that implies like, hey, you used to be so mean, and I'm glad you're not mean at work anymore, hopefully that's not news and they won't be he won't be shocked and offended. And what you're implying I was a jerk? Hopefully he knows. Because he he did it. That would be the moment he reverts back to jerk mode. Yeah, yeah . You're gonna trigger a relapse. Um but on the other hand , I am continually surprised by everyone, including myself, all of our collective ability to not be very aware of anything . So I mean maybe there was personal life stuff going on, right? Maybe maybe he was having some relationship troubles or health challenges, or maybe there's something that was causing him a bunch of stress, and he kind of resolved that thing, and it it influenced him to become less of a jerk instead of a deliberate effort to say, wow, I'm sure yelling up at people a lot at work and I would like to stop. But uh let's see, intensity dialed down, approachable supportive. Hmm, I'm trying to imagine and you're a friend. I feel like you should be able to say something about it. You you could just say, hey, I really appreciate how much you have worked on being more approachable and supportive. And I remember some early interactions that were kind of scary and sounds like you were pretty upset at people and I've noticed you really have become more less of a monster. I don't want to say approachable and supportive again. Yeah, you used to be horrifying. Used to be one of the worst people I knew. And now you're not. Congrats. Good work. Yeah. Now you're the second worst . Is there a an approach here that doesn't involve acknowledging the bad side of this while just simply focusing on who this person has become. Yeah. Where you just say, Hey, really appreciate how approachable you are and how respectful you are to others. It's great and I like it. Thank you. Instead of s acknowledging the the relative change, meaning the delta between what you were and what you are. Yeah. I think that might feel less impactful because you're part of the excellence here is is how big the change is. Right. But it wouldn't be bad. I mean I don't think there's a way you could take it wrong. Maybe you go into the conversation by saying how much you admire his current state without acknowledging the past and see if he gives you an opening to acknowledge the change. Yeah, it's true. Maybe he'll say, like, yeah, man, I remember your first day and how I chewed that person out on the Zoom. And then you say, Yeah. Boy am I glad I don't do that anymore. Right. Like I was such a monster. I'm yeah. And who knows, maybe maybe he'll open his soul to you and say, I'm actually recovering from a serious like alcohol abuse situation in my life or I've I was coming out of a bad life circumstance or something you know something that is personal but kind of helps explain it and then that's your opening, right? And you can say, Wow, fantastic job. I just want to say like I'm really impressed with the the changes you've made. But maybe I I would probably go in especially in this situation where I'm kind of a more junior person, I would probably go in not really wanting to acknowledge the change, but just acknowledge the current state and then see what kind of opening or closing he gives you. Every time I think it's probably going to be fine, what's the worst that could happen? I remember how wide the range of human experience is. And surely there's some combination of circumstances where this friendly, kind human just blows up at you if you say the wrong thing. So Well that's I mean espe,cially this particular human, right? Like that's something this person has done. So I don't know. I just feel like it's probably fine if you say, hey, I admire how great you're doing and I really appreciate I see such a huge change w in you from when I first joined. And I really appreciate it. I'm sure it took a lot of work on your part. Yeah. I feel like the chances of that going poorly if this person is is as supportive and kind as you describe them to be are just sound so low. Yeah. That sounds pretty naive . Well yeah, but also that's just I'm also acknowledging that. Yeah, it is pretty naive. I have not seen a lot of ways things can go horribly wrong. Yeah. Yeah. And my my recommendation for letting the other person give the permission to acknowledge the change is not really based it's not coming from a place of fear. Like, oh, he might yell at me. That's not at all what I was thinking. It was more like just respecting that person's desire to talk about things or not, you know? Yeah, that's true. I mean if it was a really bad time in his life, then maybe he does want to just focus on the now. Yeah, maybe. Who knows? Either way, it's pretty personal. I mean, no one makes a ch ange like that without effort, I think. That that just doesn't happen automatically. Yeah. Some people do get softer as they age. Like I'm certainly in that boat. Like I in certain ways, you know, as I've aged, like I'm maybe a little bit more emotional sometimes about cute things, you know, like things involving kids or relationships that you know, things like that. They kinda tug at my heartstrings a little bit more than when I was a young whippersnapper, but still ha even having said that, this kind of change where you literally yell at people at work and now you're like super approachable and nice, that probably took effort. Yeah. Which is I don't know. Right. I find it inspiring that people do change like this. I am scared sometimes I'm going to get stuck. I'm gonna get frozen as just whoever I am right now plus fifty years. But you're already so great. Like what what's the problem? Just lock it in, man. Well, I suppose I could get I could get worse. So maybe frozen is better than that. Press that cruise control button on your whole state. I don't want to though. I see people around me who I mean I have a limited view of their internal experience, but to my perception they appear to have just kinda done that, just kind of locked in at some age and not really changed at all. And that sounds sad to me. I feel like I've got plenty I would like to get better at or improve on and so uh good good job your friend slash maybe manager. Well, have we answered this question? I think so. Just go in there with gusto and tell them how proud you are of all the changes they made in their life from all the terrible things they used to do. Dave, this question reminds me of something which is I just really appreciate your personal hygiene so much. And you lately have smelled so good. Well, I'm glad to hear that because I like that. I've been working on that. How do I tell you that you used to horrify me with uh your awful stench? Well I I ran out of deodorant for twenty years and now I've got some more . I stopped my dog feces deodorant regime. The all natural. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Thank you. What could people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to soft skills.audio and click the ask question button. And the more passive aggressive you write your question, the better. We just really like that. And we read every one of 'em and we love 'em. So keep 'em coming, thank you. Thank you, thank you. We will catch you next week .